Profile:
Jennifer Brier has a joint appointment in the History Department and the Program in Gender and Women’s Studies. She teaches courses in US gender history as well as the history of sexuality. In both her teaching and research, Brier is interested in exploring the historical intersections of gender, race, and sexuality. She is working on a manuscript entitled, Infectious Ideas: AIDS and US Politics, 1980-2000, that argues that the AIDS epidemic provides a prism through which we can see the political history of the 1980s and 1990s in a new light. By placing the history of a successful yet contentious social movement organized to deal with the AIDS epidemic in conversation with a more traditional political history of how the state dealt with this public health crisis, she links a historical account of national ideology with community based actions. She also connects the development of domestic AIDS policy and action between 1981 and 1992 to the development of US global AIDS policy and activism after 1987.